Intel has just announced its Atom 'Clover Trail+' SoC platform for smartphones and tablets. This mainly marks a step up in terms of graphical performance from the existing Intel Atom Z2760 SoC that is featured in numerous Windows 8 tablet. As mentioned earlier, the new Clover Trail+ chips comprise the Intel Atom Z2580, Z2560 and Z2530 processors. They feature dual-core performance, with support for Hyper-Threading that enables up to four processing threads for execution on each physical core of the chip.

With the introduction of these new SoCs, it also marks Intel deepening commitment to the smartphone market; its initial entry was actually the Yolo, a low-cost Android handset, developed in collaboration with Kenyan service provider, Safaricom. The Yolo is powered by an Intel 'Lexington' Atom Z2420 processor first introduced at CES 2013. We reported earlier that the Lenovo K900 is the first phone to feature the new Clover Trail+ platform.

Although Intel has updated the graphics core engine of the new Intel Atom chips, one major impediment is the lack of 4G LTE support for the new chips. One of the strongest players in the smartphone market, Qualcomm has just announced its RF360 baseband chip that is touted to eliminate LTE band fragmentation due to its support for over 40 such bands. Hence, its adoption by high-end smartphone makers may be an uphill task. For the official Intel press release, do visit this link.